Green

On our way back from the Sand Paper Press reading at Adobe Books in San Francisco, Arlo Haskell and I drove through Big Sur on our way back to Los Angeles. Arlo had never been before; this was my fourth visit, my third in six months. I never stay longer than twenty-four hours. I don’t know why. As someone who doesn’t normally feel a primal connection to a place, I ought to take advantage of the stirrings when they occur. Certainly I wouldn’t have been the first to feel them in this place. Robinson Jeffers, Henry Miller,

The other day the ambience at Big Sur was particularly dramatic. There was mist in the air from everywhere – from the mountains to the west, where fog was stuck; from the ocean, which was pounding the rocks with particular force. And the sun stuck the mist similarly everywhere, so that the air glowed yellow, the fabled gold of California.

When you drive south through Big Sur, you must stop and see the elephant seals at Piedras Blancas. There were huge males on the beach on Tuesday, maybe 15 feet long, with doe-like black eyes and crumpled snouts that look like a baby bird has perched on their faces.

This reminds me of a poem by the wonderful Argentinian poet Hector Viel Temperley, whose work I have been translating for some years. It’s from Legión extranjera (1978), a breakthrough volume in which Viel’s surrealist and visionary Christian impulses begin to catapult one another, and the reader, into vertiginous orbit. The poem is ‘El verde claro’ (The Luminous Green), and in it the poet listens to a woman (perhaps a naturalist?) as he stands on the shore: ‘Between the lighthouse and the spray and the green crags / one of the women explained it all: / She explained how old elephant seals / are forced to stop pursuing the females and so / They rub their penises on the baby / elephant seals / and with their flippers keep them still // I told her a different story : / Not so long ago I met a young monk fresh from the cloister / who writes hymns for the services / And not only does he write music and lyrics / But he signs his name and sings them / He’s got a good voice / and can play the guitar / But this isn’t getting us anywhere! / I dreamed about closer, more likely things / My other and I are two bags of luminous green / connected by an umbilical cord / And sharks flee from our luminous / green shadows / while we tread water in a luminous green sea / in the luminous / Green breath of an African sea.’

Viel deserves to be better known even in his native country, and certainly in this one as well, a situation I am hoping to soon improve.